The center is planning a memorial event on Sept. 3, and also has launched a $1 million fundraising campaign to maintain and digitize Morgan’s collection.

THE SPECIMENS

Chris Lay, the center’s administrative director, pulled out one of the 200 drawers containing Morgan’s insects. This drawer held hundreds of colorful beetles, pinned in boxes with tiny, meticulous labels describing where and when they were found and on which plants.

“This one is the Santa Cruz rain beetle,” Lay said, pointing to around two dozen fat, black dead insects roughly the color and size of a medjool date. “It hardly ever comes out at the surface, only after the first rain.”

Next to that box was another with around 50 smaller green and gold iridescent bugs — the Ohlone tiger beetle — which Morgan discovered in the 1990s, an endangered insect that only remains in a few prairies in the county.

“Until somebody like Randy goes out and discovers these, when and where they’re found and puts a name on it — until we do that, we can’t have an intelligent discussion about what’s their ecology, how do we manage them, what do we do with them,” Lay said.

Most of Morgan’s insect collection consists of butterflies and bees, due to his interest in pollination. From 1989 to 1999, Morgan visited 40 sites throughout the county, gathering insects in film canisters with parts of the plant they were found on, scribbling his notes on scraps of paper. At night, he’d put the insects in his freezer, then pin them to boards with labels and write in his field journal.

“I don’t know how he did it,” Lay said. “He did nothing else for 11 years of his life. It was 40 locations but he’d visit five or six in one year, once every three weeks over the whole year, collecting sometimes 200 specimens in one day.”

THE INITIATIVE

Before Morgan died, Lay and others from the center outlined a $1 million initiative to maintain and curate Morgan’s collections, and fund an undergraduate field study course as well as mentoring programs in local environmental stewardship.

The insect collection was well-kept, but plant collection did not start out organized — for many years it was kept in stacks of newspapers in his house. Now the plants are clearly labeled and climate-controlled, glued onto paper and kept cabinets at the center, with the data public on the web, thanks to a two-year grant, Lay said.

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The next step is to digitize the insect collection’s records, so scientists can better study it.

The insects are easily the most valuable part of the center’s collection of preserved animals, skeletons and plants from around the world, said Lay, especially in this era of rapid climate change.

“To have this really accurate snapshot of what was here at a particular time, it’s just going to become more valuable,” Lay said.

THE MAN

Dylan Neubauer is a Santa Cruz woman who worked on two books with Morgan on the county’s native plants. She first met him in the 1990s, when she “knew next to nothing about plants,” she said, and ended up spending countless hours in the field with him.

“He was constantly collecting, constantly writing notes, constantly muttering to himself,” Neubauer said. “In the early days, I remember I just had no clue what was really going on. I would just go out with him and lie down in some field of flowers and he’d be rushing around collecting things madly.”

“I was clueless. Later on, I’d be with him asking questions: And what’s that? What’s that? What are you seeing? Eventually, I, just through many different media, I just kind of absorbed his world view,” she said.

Stephen McCabe, a retired research director at UCSC’s arboretum, said Morgan’s discoveries on the county’s plants and insects, combined with his public advocacy for conservation, led to the preservation of several rare spots: parts of Quail Hollow Quarry in Felton, the Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve, parts of the Scotts Valley High School campus and along Glenwood Drive.

And of course, there’s the Randall Morgan Sandhills Preserve, a 189-acre rare habitat in the San Lorenzo Valley, named after him by the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County.

“There was something about him, his personality and his love of the plants and the insects and the birds and the trees, that somehow he inspired other people to work on it too, so it wasn’t just a one person show,” McCabe said.

Lay said Morgan also played a role in the preservation of Arana Gulch, the Moore Creek Preserve, the Westside Santa Cruz greenbelt, and even parts of UCSC.

Lay said toward the end, when Morgan was in the hospital, he would visit him with stacks of papers, asking him where he got certain specimens. Then Morgan would point on maps.

“I still have questions that come up. I’m going through his notes line by line, and it’s like ‘Oh, what did you mean by that?’” Lay said. “I wish I could ask him. We managed to extract a lot of information from him, and there’s still more.”

Randall Morgan Memorial

What: A potluck to celebrate Randall Morgan, a Santa Cruz naturalist who died of cancer on June 6.